A couple of weeks ago we reported on Jon Hyland’s NanoSeeker Micro AUV project. Today Jon posted some more details on his project and he seems to be making rapid progress. With the help of a rapid prototype machine there are now working prototypes of the vehicles in the water. The NanoSeeker has a “3-axis, solid state compass, with an integrated 3-axis accelerometer”, a bluetooth debugging interface, and runs on a ATmega328 microcontroller. The vehicle is steered via two control surfaces controlled by a Solarbotics GM15 pager gearmotor. Oh, and don’t forget that the vehicle is 6 inches long and 1.25 inches in diameter!

Video of the prototype after the jump.

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Jon Hylands, on his blog this week, posted a link to his NanoSeeker Micro AUV project. The vehicle is 6 inches long and 1.25 inches in diameter. That’s tiny! Jon plans to outfit the AUV with a 6 DOF IMU, a compass, depth sensor and an ARM based microcontroller.  You can see some pictures of the prototype here.

Good work Jon, I hope to see these things swimming soon!

EngineeringTV has two tasty interviews with Boston Engineering about their tuna-like AUV, GhostSwimmer. GhostSwimmer is a project sponsored to by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to create an underwater robot that mimics the swimming motion of fish. The smoothness of motion of this vehicle is amazing. GhostSimmer weighs about 40 lbs and can carry up to a 10lb payload. The vehicle is fully functional is “user ready”. GhostSwimmer has 7 degrees of freedom in the tail, and each pectoral fin has 2 degrees of freedom. The vehicle was developed with $100k USD of STTR grants.


You can see the two interviews below. Sorry about the horrible “auto play” issue.

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Cornell University has won the 12th annual AUVSI Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition. And, according to Cornell’s tweet, second place goes to University of Victoria and 3rd to University of Rhode Island. Interestingly, these three teams weren’t even in the top 5 of last year’s compeitors (pdf), so they seem to have put in a lot of work. You can read all of the team’s technical papers here. Cornell’s, U.Vic. and URI’s papers will make interesting reading for all the 2010 competitors with an ax to grind.

Congratulations to Nova, Aerius, and Ram-Boat ’09 and all the engineers behind them on a job well done.

After the jump are two recap videos from the 1st and 2nd days competition.

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A few weeks ago, the most excellent company, SparkFun hosted an autonomous vehicle competition at their building in Builder Colorado. The competition was open to all forms of autonomous vehicles and was race around the peremeter of the buildings. Chris Anderson from DIY Drones entered a flying vehicle and won first place.

Below is a most excellent video recap of the event.